RLP 169: IGHR Advanced DNA Evidence Course Part 2

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 169 IIGHR Advanced DNA Evidence Course Part 2. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, The Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (41s):
Let’s go, hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (48s):
Hi, Nicole, how are you doing today?

Nicole (49s):
I’m doing well. How are you? What have you been working on?

Diana (54s):
Well, I’ve been reading for my morning reading the latest issue of the Georgia Genealogical Society quarterly, and I say latest edition, it was fall winter 2020. So I guess it came out a little bit late or just picked it up a little bit late. It came a little late, I think. Okay. So you’ve probably got it too, but I think it’s so fascinating. The information that is in this little quarterly, and I wanted to talk about it a little bit at the beginning. The first part’s fun, it’s Flannery O’Connor’s Genealogy. And you know, if you’re a fan of, of her that’s fun and it’s interesting to read through, and then it talks about the revolutionary war bounty lands certificates a little bit about African-American a new project there.

Diana (1m 38s):
But the thing that I thought was fascinating was the whole last half of the book, which is the Rockdale County Georgia Marriages 1902 to 1915. So when I looked at the little introductory paragraph, it said that these records have not been microfilmed by Georgia archives. And they were in the probate office in Rockdale county in very poor condition. And the binding was very loose. They’ve never been abstracted index or printed in book form, and they were not available on FamilySearch or Ancestry. So they are indexed completely in this quarterly. Cool. But how many other quarterlies have similar things like this that are not anywhere else and we’re missing out?

Diana (2m 23s):
So, you can use PERSI the periodical source index to find things like this that have been published years past where people took these records and put them into a genealogy journal. So, anyway, I wish I had people in Rockdale in this period of time. It’d be super fun to find them. So if any of our listeners have ancestors, who got married between 1902 and 1915 you’ll want to check it out.

Nicole (2m 50s):
Yeah, that’s really great. It’s fun to have those periodicals as a source that we can search, you know, as part of our literature search, when we see what’s already been indexed and transcribed and abstracted and a good first step to do that, sometimes I think we forget.

Diana (3m 5s):
Yeah. And a reminder that not everything is on FamilySearch or Ancestry, you know, maybe eventually it will be, but probably not. There are things that are just still in the back room and people have gone in and worked on indexing them. We just seek it out.

Nicole (3m 21s):
Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. So next year we have our study groups for 2022 all planned out the spring DNA study group will be given on February 16th and the fall Research Like a Pro study group will begin in September. So make sure you join our two newsletters. We have our steady group newsletter for information about that and our Family Locket newsletter for weekly updates on new blog posts and podcast episodes and eCourse information.

Diana (3m 50s):
Great. Well, last episode, we talked about your course from the Institute of Genealogical and Historical Research hosted by the Georgia Genealogical Society on DNA as Genealogical Evidence. There’s a lot of Genealogical there, and this was an advanced course with Karen Stanbary as the coordinator and then some great presenters. And so today we’re going to finish going through the golden nuggets. You talked last time about how you were to pick out the golden nuggets, those really important little key facts you want, to remember. So we’re going to keep going. And you mentioned that one of those came from Paul Woodbury and it was about targeted testing.

Diana (4m 33s):
So tell us more about that.

Nicole (4m 35s):
Yeah. So this kind of piggybacks on one of the takeaways from Michael Lacopo, who said, we should use DNA as an active tool, not a passive tool, meaning to go out and test the people that will help you answer your questions. Paul continued that thread, he talked about going out and getting the data you need by targeted testing. And he really went into how to do that. So he talked about how each descendant of a research subject will inherit different parts of that, that research subject’s DNA. So in order to achieve the maximum coverage of that ancestor, we need to test multiple of their descendants. And I remember watching a Tom Jones lecture about using DNA to solve a difficult case in the past where he had targeted tested a lot of people, maybe like 10 people.

Nicole (5m 22s):
And I just thought, oh wow, that’s so expensive and so difficult. And how do you do that? But now it’s just so much easier to do that because testing has come down in price and a lot of people have already tested. And so it’s definitely possible even for those of us on a budget. And with Paul, he comes at his cases with an interesting perspective because he is a professional researcher who does client work all the time and he’s the DNA expert over at Legacy Tree Genealogist. So he works on DNA cases like every day. And so he’s got a lot of ideas and experience for how to get to the answer to the research question efficiently.

Nicole (6m 7s):
And one of those things that he is constantly doing is making sure that he has the right people tested to help him narrow in on the right group of matches. That will give the answer to the research question. And so sometimes that means testing a cousin on the opposite side so that you can filter out, you know, those paternal matches. And sometimes it means testing a lot of descendants of a historical person. You know, the further back you go, the more test-takers you really need to get more coverage of that Ancestors genome. So what he says is that testing a first cousin or second cousin is more helpful than testing your own siblings.

Nicole (6m 48s):
So if you have a lot of siblings, you know, maybe test a couple of them, but if you have eight siblings, it’s better to not to test all eight of your siblings, but to go and test first cousins and another cousin through another line. So that all that DNA that was passed down differently and recombined through different of your aunts and uncles can be utilized to help find relevant matches.

Diana (7m 10s):
Yeah, that’s really important. And we look at that with our client work too. You know, if we’ve got a generation closer, they’ve got better DNA and you do, you would just want to expand your horizons when you’re thinking of who you are testing or whose tests you’re using.

Nicole (7m 28s):
Yes. That reminds me of a client project that I had just got set up recently. And in talking with the client, he told me that he had the DNA results of his wife and then also his wife’s mother. And I just told him, you know, we don’t need your wife’s results because we have her mothers. And after I initially looked at his mother-in-law’s close matches, I saw that she had a first cousin in the database. And so we’re working on getting her results shared with us because those are going to be relevant to the research question and hopeful.

Diana (8m 0s):
Yes, absolutely. I have the exact same scenario that we’re working on a different project. So I think it’s just being aware of that. We think we understand how inheritance works with DNA, but some of these little nuances from someone that works with it regularly really can help us solve some of our cases. So I love getting tips from Paul because he does work with a day in and day out and enhanced done for years. So, so good to see what he has to say. Okay.

Nicole (8m 30s):
Yeah. He even talked about when you’re choosing different candidates, if you are going to target test, he says, you should really try and look at people who can contribute other types of helpful DNA, like X DNA, which is autosomal DNA, but it has a unique inheritance pattern. And so if you can find somebody who has X DNA from the research subject, then that can be a very useful tool, especially if you’re going to their DNA at 23andMe or FamilyTreeDNA or GEDMatch, where you can see the X match information. And then he also talked about choosing candidates to test who can test for Y DNA or mitochondrial DNA. And so if you’re going to have them take an autosomal test and they can contribute why test information, why not ask them to do both at the same time.

Nicole (9m 17s):
So it’s good to kind of think about all those different possibilities for targeted testing.

Diana (9m 23s):
Yeah. And I think it’s so interesting. I love using the X DNA if that’s available because it eliminates so many different lines. Once you understand that inheritance pattern and I love that on FamilyTreeDNA now the X matches are better matches because of their new matching algorithm. We can actually use them with more confidence now. So that’s exciting because you can take your Ancestry DNA and upload it there and use it. Yeah.

Nicole (9m 53s):
That’s a great plug for FamilyTreeDNA, and it’s really easy to upload your results there. If you download them from 23andme or Ancestry and you’re right, it’s so nice. I love that FamilyTreeDNA updated its matching algorithm to not include segments under six centiMorgans anymore. Yeah. Especially on the X chromosome where it was so snip poor and they didn’t test that many snips, you would get a lot of false matches there.

Diana (10m 18s):
Yeah. I would get a lot and I would look at them and say, no, absolutely not. This is not right. So now I don’t have very many, but if I do have them, I have a better idea of where they came from.

Nicole (10m 32s):
Yeah. The other thing Paul said was that it’s a good idea to try to choose a half-cousin to target test because those cousins who come through a different wife of your ancestor or a different husband of your ancestor, they can help you identify segments that came just from your one common ancestor. And it’s a little more helpful because you don’t have to rule out the spouse’s side of the family.

Diana (10m 56s):
I know the halfs are really helpful. That’s great.

Nicole (11m 0s):
Yeah. I have to laugh because one time in our study group, somebody said you can’t have half of a cousin. What does that even mean? That was a good conversation to have, you know because it is very important and useful to understand half relationships when you’re doing genetic genealogy research.

Diana (11m 20s):
And, you know, that’s where drawing it out in a charting program really can help you see because you’re you go, oh, okay, well he had two wives. And so the descendants of one wife and the descendants of the other way, they’re halfs, they’re not full. So it can help you visualize what’s going on in the family. Otherwise, sometimes if you’re just talking about it, you’re like, wait, I don’t understand. Even drawing it out simply on a piece of paper, you can figure it out better. Absolutely. Well, let’s get onto another something you talked about and that’s pedigree evaluations.

Nicole (11m 55s):
So tell us about that. Yes. So this was a golden nugget that came up a couple of times in different lectures and case studies and kind of goes back to some of the DNA standards that were added to the Genealogy Standards manual and the second edition in those DNA standards. It talks about how we need to make sure when we look at a DNA match and we’re trying to figure out how they are related to us, you know, we’re analyzing those DNA test results. We should take into account the possibility that we could have more than one common ancestor with one of our matches and kind of the way that you check for that is by doing pedigree evaluations and comparing your pedigree with the matches pedigree and making sure that the pedigree is complete enough where you can actually see if there is another common ancestral couple, just because you find one set of Ancestors that you both have in your tree, doesn’t mean that’s where you got the DNA from.

Nicole (12m 57s):
You know, it could be that on that brick wall, on your father’s side that you don’t know beyond your second great grandparents, that there’s some, another set of common ancestors with this match who are actually contributing that DNA. And so the pedigree evaluation is kind of an important part for making sure your conclusion is based on a good foundation and not inaccurate. So it kind of the golden nugget that Karen shared with us is that you don’t always need to do a pedigree evaluation for every single DNA match that you’re using in your proof argument. That’s just because when we have a lot of matches in these historical cases that we’re doing, you know, we have lots of test takers and they all match the same people and that Genetic network provides a lot of evidence for our case, but then every once in a while, we’ll have an anomaly and we’ll see that two matches are sharing more DNA than is the average for the relationship.

Nicole (13m 53s):
So that might be a time when we would need a pedigree evaluation and doing the pedigree evaluation for each match is important in the research stage, you know, as best as we can, but then writing about it in the proof argument. I think that’s where it comes down to a decision of when it’s needed. And when it’s not, sometimes it’s just not needed to be shared in the proof argument. But like I said, for the times where there’s an anomaly and there are people who are sharing a lot of DNA and it seems abnormal, then that would be a good time to really go into the pedigree evaluation. And another time we learned that a pedigree evaluation would be good as if you have just one match between a DNA match and one of the base test takers.

Nicole (14m 39s):
So let’s say that I have like three siblings and two first cousins that I’ve target tested, who are all descendants of my research subject, but only one of those five matches this certain match. And so that’s kind of an anomaly because you would expect that more than one of your base testers would match that person. So that would be a good time to do a pedigree evaluation just to show that it’s not a false match or that they’re not related in a different way. They just, you know, only one of your base test-takers inherited that same segment that the match did and that can strengthen your argument.

Diana (15m 13s):
Well, that’s a really good point. And so basically, you know, when you’re doing your research, you’re looking at the pedigree, but then when you’re writing about it, if you’ve got that one match, that things aren’t adding up quite right, that’s a conflict, right? Exactly. Come to prove you’ve got to resolve that conflict. That’s the,

Nicole (15m 29s):
A really good way of putting it. Thanks. Yeah. It’s just kind of like, you have a little conflict you need to resolve and one way to can resolve it is by sharing the results of your pedigree evaluation and showing that, you know, you have their trees, both of them back to the generation of the common ancestral couple, and maybe even back one or two more generations, and you can show that they don’t have any other common ancestors beyond the ones you found.

Diana (15m 52s):
Because we’re going to have those anomalies. It just happens because of DNA recombination. You’re, you’re just going to have those weird things that pop up. Yeah. So it’s kind of like when you’ve got all these different birth dates for a person from the census records, you got to figure it out.

Nicole (16m 8s):
Yeah. Another time that pedigree evaluation came up was in our visual phasing lecture. And we were learning about when you’re trying to find a known match to help you with your visual phasing, then it’s really important that you get it right. You know, because you’re using that as the basis for your visual phasing Chromosome map. So Karen suggested that we do a good pedigree evaluation with that match to make sure they’re only related in one way with the base test takers, the three siblings, because if they’re related in two ways, that will throw off the results of your visual phasing.

Diana (16m 44s):
Oh my goodness. That would be terrible. You could just do your whole thing and have it on a false assumption. So that is a great point. Yeah. Well, I, I’m sure you talked a little bit about why DNA testing because that’s so popular. Any golden nuggets from a Y DNA perspective.

Nicole (17m 2s):
Yeah. We had two really good lectures by Michael Lacapo about Y DNA. And he first talked about using Y DNA STR results. And then he also talked about the big, Y-700. And he has some good experience because he’s an administrator on a surname group at FamilyTreeDNA. And so he shared a lot of the things with us that he has learned through that experience. And one of them is that YDNA testing yields its fullest potential as a comparative test. So that’s what he has learned by being in a surname project. And so he urged us all to join us our name or a haplogroup project after getting the Y DNA results.

Nicole (17m 45s):
So if you don’t have one to join, then you should make your own because a standalone Y DNA result list will not really tell you as much as a comparative study or a project can tell you, his example was, you know, his surname Lacapo is from a small town in Italy. So he doesn’t have a lot of good matches at all because he needs to test more people with his surname to get that comparative value. So he can do his own surname project and start recruiting testers. Then he also talked about how to interpret our Y DNA matches. And he talked a lot about genetic distance and how that’s really not as meaningful as we often think it is.

Nicole (18m 31s):
He says that a genetic distance of zero is very meaningful because that means there haven’t been any mutations, but if you’re comparing a genetic distance of two versus five or six, that doesn’t actually really tell you how closely people are related because STRs mutate, and they can mutate even between a father and a son in one generation. And yeah, there’s, you know, the fast moving markers and the regular markers, but even regular markers can mutate randomly at any generation. So those values, he said are just very malleable and not very consistent.

Nicole (19m 12s):
He talked a lot about instead determining branch marker values and differentiating those from private marker values. And that’s what he does in the surname project that he’s a part of. So the administrators of those projects work a lot on building these Y DNA trees and figuring out when a certain branch had a nutation and then all the descendants of that branch will have that same mutation. So it really helps you delineate your distinct ancestor in that surname family tree.

Diana (19m 45s):
So when you look at those on FamilyTreeDNA, you know, they have the surname projects and you see the groupings, is that what they have done those different groupings that match that they have identified that they are the ones that are on that brown.

Nicole (20m 1s):
Exactly. Yeah. So the surname project results, you can go in and look at all the groupings that they have figured out because they’ve kind of found that certain test takers in that surname project all have the same values at a certain marker. And when it changes to a different number of STRs at that marker, then they can tell that it’s changed at that certain point. And then all the descendants of that person will have that marker instead. So there are the two things that I mentioned where the branch marker values and the private marker values. So a branch marker value is defined as a value that is shared by a distinct branch of the family.

Nicole (20m 45s):
And several matches will share similar values, a certain STR marker, and then a private marker value is shared just by one person. And it could become a branch marker value if more people from that same ancestor test. So we’ve had my dad tests and if we had like his brother and one of his first cousins test, then they would all probably be grouped into the same branch with a marker value at a certain STR that would distinguish them because of their great-grandfather, who probably had a mutation at one of those STR markers. So they all kind of descend from that branch. And you can tell by looking at the value or the number of times that STR repeated.

Nicole (21m 25s):
Yes.

Diana (21m 25s):
Yeah. Well, I, we’re working on a client project right now that comes from Virginia and you know, the dead end, of course, is in the early 1800s. And so we had the client do the Y DNA test and he is the only one of his branch on the surname project. So, you know, that tells us that we need to get some other people to test this, to connect. What we need to do is find a hypothesis and then see if we can trace down and get a descendant from that hypothesized ancestor and see if somehow they connect, you know, Y DNA testing and analysis and use is just its own ballgame. Isn’t it, there’s so much you can do with it, but you do really have to learn exactly how to use it.

Nicole (22m 10s):
Yeah. And I think the main thing that I learned here is that you can’t fish for matches as much as you can with autosomal DNA in Y DNA, because there’s just not as many test takers and a lot of the time, unless there’s been a well-established certain group already created that has been recruiting test takers, then you’re going to have to recruit your own test takers to help you figure out these branch marker values. And that’s why these genetic distance estimates can really throw you off because unless you have some of those branch marker values and things, you could get easily confused by a genetic distance of three, where you have one private marker value and your matches to private marker values.

Nicole (22m 54s):
And then you look like you’re so far apart because you’re a Genetic distance of three, but maybe in reality, you’re descended from the same second or third great grandparent.

Diana (23m 4s):
That’s a great little bit of insight because on FamilyTreeDNA, they say things like, well, you could be related between four and 12 generations. It’s like, that’s really helpful. So very interesting. Yeah.

Nicole (23m 21s):
Yeah. The golden nugget I took away from his lecture about STR Y DNA matches is that you really just can’t put that much weight on the Genetic distance. So it’s better to get some more people to test and figure out more about those branch marker values. He said, make your known information, give the unknown meaning. So when we know that there are certain people who descend from the common ancestor or the research subject, and we have them tested, then we can get some more meaning for the unknown matches because we can compare the two known matches to each other and then compare both of those known matches to the unknown match.

Nicole (24m 2s):
And then we’ll know more about that unknown match.

Diana (24m 6s):
Well, and you can also do that just by contacting those close matches and figuring out their family trees. You know, you can also get some information that way, but sometimes they don’t respond or you can’t figure it out. So

Nicole (24m 19s):
Right. And even those matches where they have a tree, but you can’t figure out where your line fits into their tree. And all you have is Genetic distance. You know, it’s still is challenging. So,

Diana (24m 31s):
Oh my goodness. Yes. I worked one of those cases and it was hard. It was actually through autosomal DNA that we were able to make more progress. So it’s really good to use both of them, I think in tandem. Yes. Well, let’s talk about another golden nugget and this one is finding the most efficient pathway to solve the research objective and no surprise that this comes from Paul Woodbury, because as a professional, he’s got to be really efficient. So I’m sure he has streamlined the process. Yeah.

Nicole (25m 4s):
As you know, this was a takeaway from one of his lectures where he was talking about making network graphs. He really likes to use Genetic networks a lot as we all do because it helps you get to the answer pretty quickly. He tends to use Node XL for network graphs, and you can follow Shelley Crawford’s tutorial for that, but he basically will download the match and in common with lists using the DNA GEDCom client and that prepares spreadsheets, a list of matches and a list of shared matches. And usually it’s going to be from Ancestry that he’s downloading these. And then after you have those two spreadsheets, you can then import them into this Excel template for note Excel, and it’s a clustering template.

Nicole (25m 48s):
And then it creates groups of matches who are related to each other. And you kind of can hypothesize that they are related along one ancestral line. I’ve been using Gephi puts the clusters in separate boxes, whereas Gephi links them all together. And sometimes it’s hard to see each cluster because they overlap sometimes. So that’s one of the neat features of note Excel, but he also uses other forms of clustering. He likes the shared clustering from Jonathan Bretscher and Genetic Affairs and the DNA GEDCom client, which has the Collin’s- Leeds method as well.

Nicole (26m 36s):
So there’s a lot of different clustering avenues that can really help you become more efficient to solve the research objective. One thing that he said at the end of this case, he was sharing is that he probably could have solved it by doing reasonably exhaustive research in documentary sources. And I thought that was so interesting because I’ve heard people say, you know, the best practice is to always do reasonably exhaustive research and documentary sources before going into look at DNA evidence. But he was saying that for him, it’s sometimes more efficient to look at the DNA evidence in tandem or the beginning of a project. As you’re looking at the documentary research to give you clues to lead you quicker to those records, that will help you solve the case.

Nicole (27m 19s):
And that’s what happened with this one. So he did the cluster analysis and that helps lead him to a possible brother of the research subject and led to the parents. And he said he probably could have found that connection later by doing a lot of reasonably exhaustive research in FAN club records and land records, which he did find, but I just thought it was interesting. You know, everybody has their own advice for how to do things, but for him, sometimes it’s more efficient to do the DNA and the documentary research at the same time, instead of doing all the documentary first.

Diana (27m 51s):
Oh, I totally agree with that. I like to do the timeline and get down. What’s known from the documents and then look at the DNA and kind of go back and forth. I am a fan of that process

Nicole (28m 5s):
And that’s kind of what we teach in our Research Like a Pro with DNA study group, and Course that, you know, we do, it’s good to see what the DNA matches are showing you. And then look at the documentary and make a research plan where you check both of them.

Diana (28m 19s):
I find that the DNA gives you the great clues, but then you have to go build trees and you have to work in the documents. And then sometimes you have to go back to the DNA and see if it works. You know, you really, in my opinion, going using both of them in tandem is the most efficient way. Well, what else did you learn from Paul? I see that you have a golden nugget out a multi kit analysis, which I have not heard of.

Nicole (28m 44s):
It’s interesting. Yeah. So Paul did a lecture for Legacy Family Tree Webinars about this case. So I’ll put a link to it in the show notes because it’s really interesting, but I learned a lot about also being efficient. He was analyzing many, many DNA results from multiple descendants of a research subject. And it was a lot of people who lived in Utah who were descended from polygamous families and a bunch of them had African-American admixture, a few segments of DNA that were African-American. And they were all kind of curious where that came from and they had hypothesis so he was like looking at this certain ancestor and he ended up figuring it out where it came from and was able to prove it with documentary research too.

Nicole (29m 30s):
So it was really neat, but the multi kit analysis that he did was just another example of how to be efficient. So he downloaded all of the matches of the big group of test takers he had and the match list that he downloaded were in spreadsheets. And he combined them all into one spreadsheet with multiple tabs. And then he copied and pasted the matches and used Excel formulas to help him create a list that just included all of their DNA matches with no overlap. So one big long list of all the DNA matches of all of his test takers. And then he used a fancy Excel formula to help him add columns that showed how much DNA each of those matches shared with each of the test takers.

Nicole (30m 19s):
And so sometimes, you know, the matches would only share with one test taker, but the ones that he was interested in were the ones where those matches shared with multiple the test takers. And then he could see that those were the matches of interest to focus on. And then he could kind of sort them into people who shared the most with all the test takers and look at those. So it was kind of cool to see how he did that.

Diana (30m 40s):
Hm. Well that sounds like an interesting case study.

Nicole (30m 44s):
Yeah. And after that, he used the 23andMe Chromosome painting that shows which segments could have been African-American to identify segments that were of interest to the case. Then he did the same thing with an Excel spreadsheet using the segments that were supposedly the African-American segments and found the matches who had those same segments and tried to see what that would lead to. And he was able to figure that out as well. And it all eventually led to finding an ancestral couple in the Southern United States that had some court and probate records that discuss the fact that they had an African-American grandparent.

Nicole (31m 27s):
So that was really cool too.

Diana (31m 29s):
Oh, wow. That is, and you said this webinar is on Legacy.

Nicole (31m 33s):
It is. So I’ll put a link in the show notes because I think it’s really an interesting case study.

Diana (31m 39s):
I would love to watch that because that does happen more often than you think. You know, we have a current client who she’s matching with a lot of people with African-American ancestry and trying to figure out where that is coming from. So, very curious about that,

Nicole (31m 56s):
What you can do is you can go to Legacy Family Tree Webinars, and just put in Paul Woodbury’s name and then it will bring up all of his lectures. So that’s usually what I do when I’m trying to find

Diana (32m 7s):
I will do that and then put that on my list. I also have on my list to watch his lecture on in endogamy, because I know that one was fabulous too.

Nicole (32m 15s):
Oh, here it is. It’s called Creme de la Creme Targeted Autosomal DNA Testing to Isolate Pertinent Genetic Cousins.

Diana (32m 24s):
Okay.

Nicole (32m 25s):
I think that’s it.

Diana (32m 28s):
I love you got a little French in the title since he’s a French researcher. That’s fun. That’s

Nicole (32m 33s):
The right one.

Diana (32m 34s):
Well, for our very last segment of your course, we’re going go back to anomalies that this is from Kimberly Powell’s class.

Nicole (32m 44s):
Yeah. So her lecture was about overcoming pedigree collapse and burned counties in the south. So she talked a lot about documentary research. She had gone through a lot of substitute records at the federal level to overcome those county level losses. And she had done a lot of fan club research and she eventually was able to come up with the hypothesis for the parents of her mystery ancestor. And she did find a cluster of matches that supported her hypothesis. So that was neat. She likes to use Gephi to make those network graphs, and she was able to use the clusters to help with the pedigree collapsed by changing some of the settings and, and request during clusters to find out more information.

Nicole (33m 27s):
So that was neat to learn about. One thing I did want to share is that she had a really cool record from the Southern Claims Commission, but at first she didn’t pursue it because she just found one page of the Southern claims commission file that said it was, it was part of the barred and disallowed claims. And then when she studied it again, she realized that, you know, if it was disallowed, there was probably an application that went with it. And so she did a lot of extra research. She went to the U S court of claims, which is a national archives record group 123, and eventually found a 180 page file with application documents like affidavits from people who knew the man who was applying for relief.

Nicole (34m 14s):
And just a lot of fascinating information that, and FAN club information and just helpful clues that at first she might’ve missed, but you just have to keep following that trail of documents, like, and think about why it was created and where it could lead to. So it’s just as important to do really thorough documentary research as it is to look at our DNA matches and understand how to use DNA evidence.

Diana (34m 43s):
Yeah. I think sometimes I think DNA can just solve it and it really can’t by itself. Most of the time you’ve got to back it up with the documents. So

Nicole (34m 53s):
The title of this golden nugget was pay attention to anomalies, which I didn’t explain, I guess. But she said that several times where she saw some kind of anomaly in the documentary research and she could have just ignored it. But when she followed up on it, like this Southern claims Commission record and she looked into it deeper, she was able to find more clues and more information. So she said just don’t disregard anything. That seems unusual. Make sure you fully look into it.

Diana (35m 21s):
So she was talking about anomalies in the documentary research, whereas previously you were talking about anomalies in the DNA research. Exactly. Interesting. This has been really fun to have a little recap of your course. I was kind of jealous. I was taking Tom Jones, his writing class, which was fabulous. And we’ll have to talk about that in episodes to come. But these DNA courses, it’s amazing what you can learn. And I’m sure that it was really meaningful for you because you have studied and you’ve taken several Institute courses on DNA. And so you really got a lot out of it. You know, it’s like that layered thing, you know, the more you learn, the more you can learn this.

Nicole (36m 6s):
True. I think it really helps to have a layers of learning about DNA because you know, the first time you hear something it’s hard to digest it. So hearing these principles several times over time really helps you build up an understanding of it.

Diana (36m 23s):
Yeah, it does. And so I so appreciate Karen Stanbary for putting together course after course on DNA and they’re all different and they are all so well done. She really is a great help in the Genealogy community in educating us.

Nicole (36m 40s):
Absolutely. Thank you Karen. I know she listens. All right. Well, I hope you guys learned something you could take away with your DNA evidence and genealogical research, and we will talk to you again next week.

Diana (36m 55s):
All right. Bye. Bye everyone.

Nicole (37m 32s):
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